Best Friends

Just heard that a dear friend died a few days ago. Heard a few days ago that more Americans than ever say they have no best friend. He could have been a best friend. I’ll miss him. I’ll miss he and his wife as a couple. And his laugh. Halloween will be bittersweet this year. Don’t worry about the future, make your friend a best friend for today.

Rocketboom and Paul is 64

Good business partners are hard to come by, especially in the creative world. Look at Lennon and McCartney or any number of other feuding twosomes. So it seems that Rocketboom has exploded with Amanda Congdon and Andrew Baron feuding and likely ending their mutual success. Too bad. The lawyers will get involved with the 49% issue and probably kill any chance the Rocketboom survives as a brand even with its spot on Tivo. I’m certain we’ll see Amanda again has her name and face are now recognizable.

Scoble brings up money issues as a possible problem at Rocketboom, but more interesting is his discussion of a salesforce. In our advertising driven internet days, never underestimate the need for sales. They are the real partner in any business and one sorely missing from most. Thus the overwhelming success of Google’s Adsense. This is also why many lasting partnerships include a salesperson.

I hope we’ll see alot more advise for structuring startups in the blogosphere in the next few days, even if it repeats classic lessons learned. Good time for Guy Kawasaki and others to speak up.

Engineering Discussion: RSS and Atom

Have the flames died down enough that engineers can now talk about RSS and Atom? I hope so, because there is an interesting post by an Amazon engineer that you can do things with Atom that you can not do with RSS.

Unless the Atom was an exact copy of RSS, that would always be true. The real question is “Can you do something significant with Atom that you cannot do with RSS?” DeWitt Clinton provides a good example of why that is true for those that care about the technical details (like engineers). I might find a case in my coding where that is true. And I’d also look at the Yahoo media RSS namespace in that case. However, for the majority of sites providing new information on a daily basis (e.g., news media, bloggers, etc.), RSS is still the best match.

And as Dewitt points out, for the average user or manager, RSS is a fine term for syndication. Which leads me back to my hope that engineers can now talk about Atom and RSS.

Business Week Tries to Billboard Google's Products

In So Much Fanfare, So Few Hits, Business Week looks the lack of number one products beyond search: News, Gmail, Maps, Instant Messaging, Checkout and more. Google says that they expect several new products to fail. This is the publishing model and should be examine more thoroughly. I’d also like to see a side by side comparision of Google’s products and Yahoo’s. Might as well add in MS, Amazon, Cnet, AOL and a few others. Many of the big and small players follow this publishing model and is should be discussed.

Dave Winer Doing S3 Heavy Lifting

So often Dave Winer is working and thinking along the same lines as myself but a few steps ahead. Here is is again talking with Amazon about developing with S3. Keep pioneering Dave!

Future of RSS by Newsgator

Techcrunch summary of Newsgator’s view of the future of RSS. I believe that no enterprise should consider any software that does not produce useful RSS feeds which is the future of RSS.

json

The Ajax community continues to buzz about the json data format. I even went to the talk by … at Ajax Experience which was great, but you can get most of the same info from the web site. After about 3 hours of coding using json yesterday, I’m convinced that it is a big deal and it is a better format that XML for many applications.

So what is the big deal? Any significant use of a new content format has many implications – it is a new extension of man. This would be worth probing using McLuhan’s Laws of Media.

Rail NoVA

If the waters don’t get me, I’ll be going to the NoVA Ruby on Rails meeting tonight.

TechDirt Keeping Net Neutrality Debate in Line

Not sure about all the Net Neutrality ads and blogs? Check Techdirt. They are doing a good job of debunking the arguements and editorials.

Corporate Blogging - Book Party

Debbie Weil is having pre-publication event for her book: Corporate Blogging. See you there?